Nokia would had killed itself either way, with Elop it still tried to flop.
Every Nokia fanboy cries about EEE, but blissfully forgets what a turd was 5800 Xpress Music, which came half a year later than iPhone 3G.
Yes it had huge systemic issues. Structural problems, too many departments pumping out too many phones with overlapping feature sets, and an incoherent platform strategy.
But Elop flat-out murdered it with his burning platforms memo and then flogged the scraps to the mothership. It came across as a stitch-up from the word go.
RiM basically killed off a big chunk of the Nokia market, as it did for Windows CE as well.
By the time the original iPhone came out, Nokia hadn’t really put out anything to capture the mindshare in a while. They were severely hampered by the split of their Symbian lineup (S30,40,60,90) and unable to adapt to the newest iteration of smartphones.
They’d never have been able to adapt to compete without throwing out Symbian, which they held on to and tried to reinvent. Then there was the failure of MeeGo.
Nokia would have been in the same spot they’re in today regardless of Microsoft. They’d be just another (sadly) washed up Android phone brand. Just like their biggest competitors at the time: Sony Ericsson and Motorola.
But at least we got a lot of Qt development out of it.
You know why it was 'Xpress Music'? Because Nokia was years late for a 'music phone'. Even Moto had E398 and SE had both music and photo. By 2009 Nokia had a cheap line-up for the brand zealots (eaten up by Moto C-series and everyone else), a couple of fetishist's phones (remember those with floral pattern and 8800?) and.. overpriced 'commucators' with subpar internals (hell, late PDAs on Xscale had more RAM and CPU power) and incompatible with anything, including themselves, mess of Symbian.
Elop not only allowed MS to try the waters with mobiles, but actually saved many, many workplaces for years. Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around 2013.
They made a -lot- of stupid decisions, both in sticking to 'what they knew' and bad decisions with cutting-edge tech (N900 comes to mind, you couldn't get one in the states with the right bands for 3G).
I will always love the Lumia cameras however, even their shit tier models had great image quality.
> Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around 2013.
The alternative would have been some restructuring by someone with a better idea than crashing the company and selling the name to his real bosses at MS.
The company was in trouble but salvageable. Elop flat-out murdered it, and it looked a lot like he did it to try to get a name brand for MS to use for its windows phones, which were failing badly (and continued to do so).
They should have continued maemo 5 and bet hard on it. The big rewrites for n9, and continued focus on symbian as a cash cow, hurt them.
No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph.
In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android.
To be salvageable you need something in demand on the market and Nokia only had a brand. You can't salvage an 18-wheeler running off the cliff.
Personally, I had a displeasure of trying to do something on colleague's N8 somewhere in 2011-2012. Not only it was slow as molasses but most of the apps which relied on Ovi were nonfunctional.
Insightful tidbit from N8 wiki page:
> At the time of its launch in November 2010 the Nokia N8 came with the "Comes With Music" service (also branded "Ovi Music Unlimited") in selected markets. In January 2011, Nokia stopped offering the Ovi Music Unlimited service in 27 of the 33 countries where it was offered.
So popular and salvageable what they discontinued the service 3 months after the launch? Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011?
[0] Yep, this is what really killed WP too - lack of the momentum on the start, inability to persuade Instagram to bake the app for WP, falling integrations (whey worked at the start! Then Facebook decided it doesn't want to be integrated anywhere because everyone should use their app) => declining market share => lack of interest from developers => declining market share => lack of...
But there were all sorts of options to restructure a company that big that had only just been surpassed by android at the time of the memo. Tanking what was left of the company and selling out to MS was probably the worst of them.
It's quite funny, the guardian article on the memo, that reproduces it in full, is here - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/09/noki...
First comment below the line "If Nokia go with MS rather than Android they are in even bigger trouble."
Everyone could see it, apart from Stephen Elop, who was determined to deliver the whole thing to MS regardless of how stupid a decision it was.
That's the problem. Momentum and more importantly - momentum in the big ass company notorious for it's bureaucracy, red tape and cultural[0] policy of doing nothing above the needed yet jealously protecting own domain from anyone.
> Everyone could see it
You are forgetting what if Nokia pivoted to Android in Feb 2011, than the first usable, mass produced yet first one for the company unit (ie: with all bugs, errors a first thing in the line you can encounter) would be at Q4 2012 at the very, very best. More sane estimate (considering their total unfamiliarity with the platform and, again, cultural nuances) would say somewhere in Q1-Q2 2013. There it would then compete with the already established market of Android (Moto RAZR would be 1y+ old) and iPhone 5.
Even if they somehow managed to do it in less than a year (like a fairy godmother came and magically did everything for them, including production and shipping) then they would needed to compete with iPhone 4S, which as we know was extremely popular and people held them for years.
No fucking way they could do anything to stay afloat. That is why I say what would be bankrupt by 2013. You may don't like Elop and his actions as much as you want, but there is zero chances they could do anything themselves.
Oh, one more thing. Sure in 2009 Nokia had the money. By 2011 creditors lowered N. rating (reflected in the memo), which means what by 2012 they would have no spare money aka cash. And you probably forgetting what Nokia had a ridiculous amount of employees (which clearly seen by how many were let go by 2013-2014). You need many, many monies to support that amount of people and you can't tell them to fuck off like in the US with the at-will employment, you need to provide the severance and pension funds for everyone. Without money the only thing you can do is to close the doors and file for bankruptcy. If you want to continue your business - you need first to pay out the social responsibilities. And that costs money. And guess who not only had the money but was willing to pour them into Nokia?
[0] Literally. I've read the 'memoirs' of the guy who worked there before and while. I had a friend working in Finland some time later. The stories she told about passiveness, lack of enthusiasm, always trying to evade the responsibility - just confirmed me the things what I knew at that time, and no amount of naked sauna helps. Hell, they didn't even had the guts to fire her, instead making macabre dances to force her to quit. Which, after a more than half of year of doing literally nothing (their way to get her out), she gladly did and went to MS.
Funny enough, she is at Google now and some shit what is happening there directly resembles what was happening almost decade ago in Finland.
I'm not forgetting anything. All of these issues are present in a switch to the Microsoft platform too, and it was already clear to most observers when they did that, that the MS platform was dead in the water.
> hey would needed to compete with iPhone 4S
As did every other player, and outside the US the iPhone was not dominant in the same way.
> you can't tell them to fuck off like in the US
They had engineering units in the US which they could have done that to. And there are things you can do in most European countries too, when situations are dire.
> You may don't like Elop and his actions as much as you want, but there is zero chances they could do anything themselves.
I very much disagree, as do many observers. It could have been turned around with good management, but that doesn't seem to have been Elop's aim, his aim seemed to be to fulfill goals for MS.
> And guess who not only had the money but was willing to pour them into Nokia?
Yes, it was a stitch-up job for MS to buy an established name to try to save their dead mobile platform.